Victor Ostrowidzki, survivor of Nazi-occupied Poland who became Hearst White House reporter, dies at 80

Victor Ostrowidzki, veteran newspaperman in Washington and Albany, N.Y., and faculty member at Flagler College, died Saturday in St. Augustine, Fla.

He was 80 years old and was recently diagnosed with melanoma. His death at the Community Hospice in St. Augustine was announced by his family.

Ostrowidzki was a White House reporter during the Reagan administration and covered health care issues in the Clinton era. He also reported on every presidential election from 1964-1988.

Ostrowidzki was known among his colleagues for his respectful, understated interviewing style — and for his prodigious background knowledge about the issues and people he was writing about.

Before transferring to the Washington bureau of Hearst Newspapers in 1979, Ostrowidzki was a reporter for 27 years for the Hearst-owned Albany Times Union where he helped cover New York state government during the administrations of Averill Harriman, Nelson Rockefeller, Malcolm Wilson and Hugh Carey. He was a three-time winner of the New York Legislative Correspondents Assn. annual award for excellence in covering New York state government and politics.

As a Washington reporter, Ostrowidzki aggressively asserted the need to cover such issues as bridges, highways, airports, electrical grids and railroads at a time when the very word “infrastructure” had yet to move into the mainstream American idiom.

He was a native of Kutno, Poland, where his father, Erazm, was a Polish army officer and, prior to the outbreak of World War II, police commissioner in Bielsk Podlaski in Eastern Poland.

Ostrowidzki and his family survived the Nazi and Soviet occupations during and after World War II before he escaped to Sweden in 1947 and then to England where he attended high school and Kings College in London.

The family immigrated to the U.S. in 1950 and settled in the Albany area.

Ostrowidzki joined the Times Union as a copyboy in 1952 and graduated from Siena College, Loudonville, N.Y., in 1954 and later received a master’s degree there.

Later, Ostrowidzki served in the U.S. Army in Germany where he used his language skills – English, German, Polish and Russian – in assisting U.S. forces during the post-World War II effort in interacting with Russian and German authorities.

He is survived by his wife, Sharon; three children, Alicia Rubin of Stamford, Conn.; Eric, of Vancouver, B.C.; and David, of Clifton Park, N.Y.; two step-children, Laurie Tipton of Flagler Beach, Fla., and David Wolf of Falls Church, Va.; six grandchildren and four step-grandchildren; and his brother Joe, of El Paso, Texas.
His first wife, Rita, passed away in 1988.

In 1979, Ostrowidzki accompanied Pope John Paul II on the pope’s first trip back to his native Poland since becoming pope. He again returned to Poland with the pope in 1983 and 1986, and with President George H.W. Bush in 1989. On that trip, he stayed in Eastern Europe to cover the collapse of communism in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

Because of his linguistic skills and knowledge of Eastern Europe, Ostrowidzki often helped other American correspondents traveling on assignment in the region.

Patrick Sloyan, the then-London-based correspondent for Newsday, recalled his 1983 trip to Poland to cover the pope’s visit.

“Victor was the tour director for American correspondents,’’ Sloyan said. “He knew the language, he knew the geography, he knew the news makers. He opened many doors for all of us.’’

Back in the Washington bureau, Ostrowidzki would conduct occasional impromptu seminars in the newsroom about segments of Polish history in an effort to help educate his colleagues about current events in Eastern Europe.

After 45 years with Hearst, Ostrowidzki retired in 1997 and he and his wife moved to Ormond Beach, Fla. He joined the faculty at Flagler College in nearby St. Augustine and taught courses in journalism, politics, and European history and was the director of the Forum on Government and Public Policy at Flagler, a series of public presentations by journalists and scholars for the greater St. Augustine community.

Dr. William T. Abare, president of Flagler, said Ostrowidzki “loved teaching and interacting with students, faculty, and staff, and the college.

“He was an exceptional teacher who brought extensive knowledge and experience to the classroom. He truly cared for his students, and he challenged and engaged his students by focusing on material that would hold lasting relevance for them.”

Flagler students often commented on his gentle friendly manner. One student wrote, anonymously, on ratemyprofessors.com: “This man is really pleasant. I like how he remembers his students and makes small talk with them after they’ve already completed his class. He exudes positive energy. Smart and experienced…has actually worked in the real world, so he knows what he’s talking about!”

Robert J. Danzig, former president of Hearst Newspapers and former publisher of the Times Union, recalled that when he was being rotated through different departments at the Times Union as part of his on-the-job management training, Ostrowidzki had been assigned the job of mentoring him about newsroom operations.
“He made me ask people on the street odd questions,’’

Danzig recalled, conjuring up the boot camp regimen that Ostrowidzki imposed. “He assigned me to a dark closet in the state Capitol and told me to look at pay records to check on the overtime pay of every political appointee holding a summer job.

“I told him, ‘Victor, one day I’ll get you.’ Later, when I became publisher of the newspaper, he said to me, ‘OK, I’ve been got.’’’

“When my first story appeared in the newspaper, I was bursting my buttons with pride about my byline in print,” Danzig said. “But Victor left a note on my typewriter, telling me my lead sentence was too long. Talk about deflation!’’

Danzig praised Ostrowidzki as a “dear man of rich talent. He had so many elements to his life. He did so many things _ and he did them well.’’

Harry Rosenfeld, editor of the Times Union during much of Ostrowidzki’s tenure there, said he was “a man absorbed in his work _ he took it seriously and to heart and gave it all his energy.’’

Former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo recalled Ostrowidzki as “a wonderful person, very bright, very devoted to the Times Union.’’

“Victor was ‘old country’ in the sense that practicality was very high on his agenda. He was good at finding his way through any morass and coming out, maybe a bit bruised, but ready to proceed to the next step.’’

“It won’t take him long to get around with the angels,’’ Cuomo continued. “He’ll work out something.”

Fred Dicker, who joined the Times Union’s Capitol bureau in 1977, described Ostrowidzki as a mentor and friend. “He taught me, initially, everything I knew about state government,” said Dicker, now the statehouse bureau chief for the New York Post.

“He was intense, hard-working, skeptical,” Dicker said, “but also he had a love of America, given his background, which put him in the category of a more old-time journalist who tried to be accommodating to political figures, because he respected what they were doing as representatives of our democracy.”

Nevertheless, “he would nail somebody if he felt it was appropriate; he loved breaking stories,” Dicker said.
Newsroom lore at the Times Union held that state government employees dreaded returning from lunch to find a “while-you-were-out” note with the message: “Call Vic Ostrowidzki at the TU.’’

Ostrowidzki was a talented amateur poker player and belonged to several regular poker groups in the Washington area.

Back in Albany, in addition to his journalistic talent, Ostrowidzki was renowned for his skill in the frequently epic poker games in the state Capitol press room. There, his winning hand on Feb. 27, 1979, a royal flush, is framed on the wall. An accompanying script quotes his lament that the pot was not all it could have been: “I wish I hadn’t raised. I really just got excited.”